I have to add, however, that UC Davis has been a top research university for many years, but that has not led to the creation of a large number of start-ups. Having a bleeding-edge academic institution in the region may be a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for creating a tech innovation hub.

UC Davis, as the article states, is a top research university. Here are some statistics, collected by UC Davis itself (http://admissions.ucdavis.edu/about/rankings.cfm):

* 14th in research funding among U.S. ranked public universities and 22nd for public and private universities
National Science Foundation 2011 R&D Expenditures

* 9th among public research universities nationwide and 39th among public and private research universities
U.S. News & World Report's 2014 "America's Best Colleges"

One more thing,

The study says that "there is a higher departure rate of older workers in STEM occupations with greater young skilled immigration into the firm. This heightened old/young differential is especially pronounced for workers earning over $75,000 a year."

Why didn't the NY Times reporter mention that?

The OP was quoting from the NY Times article that was linked to in the post. There are even quote marks in the post to indicate that. The times article gives a link to the study: http://www.people.hbs.edu/wkerr/Kerr_Kerr_Lincoln%20Feb2013.pdf .

One could blame the OP for not providing some personal commentary on the article that he or she quoted, but you can't blame the OP for not citing the study. On the other hand, one can and should blame the reporter who wrote the Times article for not summarizing the study better.

The study says that hiring of "young skilled immigrant employment, where young workers are defined as those under 40 years old" is correlated with "expansions in other parts of the firm's skilled workforce". And "a 10% increase in a firm's young skilled immigrant employment correlates with a 6% increase in the total skilled workforce of the firm." That seems logical -- a firm on a hiring spree will look for engineers from many sources. But it doesn't say anything one way or another about why the companies are hiring the immigrant workers. Is it because there's a shortage or because the immigrant workers will work for less money? The study does not say. Moreover, the study does not seem to consider that hiring of foreign workers means that fewer native workers are hired who would otherwise be hired, even if there is an overall increase in the number of native workers hired.

And I wonder how the researchers who published the study would deal with companies who lay off much of their IT staffs and replace them with contractors through Cognizant and the other large consumers of H1-B visas. The company who laid off their staff does not directly hire the H1-B visa holders, but Cognizant does. Naturally, Cognizant hires support staff and some native engineers to support the buildup of the H1-B staff. This conforms to the study's conclusions, but the net effect is that many native engineers have lost their jobs.

Amazon sells them for $99 a sensor. At that price, I can almost afford to have someone come in and water the plants for me.

Or, better yet, I can just continually get new plants and toss the old ones.

ME WANT (for those who don't read code).

Use the HTTPS-anywhere addon, from the EFF (https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere). It has rules that cause Firefox to automatically use HTTPS for dozens of web sites, including Google Search and APIs.

But, if you program open source projects for two years, that will give you the resume-worthy experience you need to get a tech job. But, by then, you'll probably have your own tech business and won't need to look for a job anywhere else.

Employment in high tech is cyclical - boom to bust, followed by boom again. It seems to happen roughly every 10 years (1991, 2001, 2009 come to mind, but there was another boom around 1980). When employment booms, there's a shortage of skilled engineers and programmers, so companies look to off-shore. Meanwhile, the number of CS students in the US skyrockets. Then those students graduate, and not long after, the industry tanks, the job market softens, and there's a local surplus of skilled workers who are suddenly more affordable vis-a-vis off-shore workers. Seeing the surplus of skilled on-shore workers, companies start "re-shoring" -- bringing jobs back to the US. But lots of unemployed engineers and programmers go on to other things and, seeing so many engineers and programmers out of work, CS enrollments plummet. When the next boom hits, there's a shortage of workers again and the cycle continues.

A change in usability could explain the drop in users, or maybe it was a fad and people have moved on to something else. Most of social media is faddish. It's like the night club business. It's very difficult to maintain popularity, even if you achieve success, because people are moving on to the next hot club.

HP layoffs (not all layoffs, really, but also including early retirement offers accepted and attrition without replacement) total over 120,000 for the past decade (includes the 29,000 in the latest round announced last Spring and increased by 2,000 in September, but not all yet realized). The issue with the workers jumping to GM is simply whether GM violated the contract. If those employees had gone, en masse, someplace else, HP would not have grounds to question it. From my point of view, the employees in question helped HP get closer to reaching the downsizing goal.